JMF again

Ah, Making Light has another installment of John M. Ford’s “occasional works.” He’s funny, poetic (in a good way, often hilarious), and worth reading just for his references to other stuff. Link. Ford’s book Web of Angels is one of the most overlooked pieces of early “cyberpunk,” and ironically one of the best. (I was jealous; I guess I got to write a lot of code and work with a lot of really good people, but I wish I could have learned to write like that).

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The Next Big Language will be FORTH. You heard it here first.

Of course, it will take a while, and when it finally happens it won’t really be FORTH anymore. It will have had to change, its zealots will have had to move on, whereupon we will be left with a nice, compact, self-describing, mutable beyond belief virtual machine with flexible linguistics and a decently transparent runtime architecture supporting fast, whizzy stuff (hear me, guys? Step one is: enter the modern world with actual memory management, okay? Strings wouldn’t be a stretch either).